State v. Estrada
| Decision Date | 12 June 2018 |
| Docket Number | DOCKET NO. A-2078-14T3 |
| Parties | STATE OF NEW JERSEY, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. EDWIN ESTRADA, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | New Jersey Superior Court — Appellate Division |
NOT FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT THE APPROVAL OF THE APPELLATE DIVISION
This opinion shall not "constitute precedent or be binding upon any court." Although it is posted on the internet, this opinion is binding only on the parties in the case and its use in other cases is limited. R. 1:36-3.
Before Judges Sabatino, Nugent and Currier.
On appeal from Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division, Bergen County, Indictment No. 11-03-0444.
Joseph E. Krakora, Public Defender, attorney for appellant (Margaret McLane, Assistant Deputy Public Defender, of counsel and on the briefs).
Dennis Calo, Acting Bergen County Prosecutor, attorney for respondent (Catherine A. Foddai, Special Deputy Attorney General/Acting Senior Assistant Prosecutor, on the brief; Annmarie Cozzi, Special Deputy Attorney General/Acting Senior Assistant Prosecutor, of counsel and on the brief).
Appellant filed a pro se supplemental brief.
This matter returns to this court following a remand we called for in our September 2016 unpublished opinion. State v. Estrada, ("Estrada I") No. A-2078-14 (App. Div. Sep. 26, 2016), motion for leave to appeal denied, 228 N.J. 500 (2017). Our opinion vacated an order nullifying a negotiated plea agreement and directed the trial court to consider the nullification issue anew, using appropriate legal standards. Id., slip op. at 16. On remand, a different judge in the trial court reconsidered the issues and independently concluded the plea agreement should be set aside.
For the reasons that follow, we vacate the trial court's May 15, 2017 nullification order, reinstate the original negotiated guilty plea, and remand the matter for sentencing.
We substantially incorporate by reference the factual and procedural background described in our September 2016 opinion. We supplement and update that background as follows.
In March 2011, defendant Edwin Estrada and his co-defendant, Andrew Abella, were charged in a thirteen-count indictment, the first eleven counts of which pertained to Estrada. Count one charged defendant with conspiring with Abella to commit burglary. Counts two and three charged both men with burglary. Count four charged defendant with murder, count five with burglary, count seven with robbery, counts six and eight with felony murder predicated on the burglary and robbery counts, respectively, count nine with credit card theft, and counts ten and eleven with weapons offenses.
As its most serious count, the indictment accused defendant of murdering an elderly victim after breaking into the victim's house to rob him. The State's proofs reflected that defendant repeatedly struck the victim in the head with a metal pot, and then fled the scene with the victim's credit card. Defendant was age eighteen at the time, and he had no prior criminal or juvenile record. The victim, the grandfather of one of defendant's acquaintances, was age eighty-eight.
Following the indictment, defendant was evaluated by a board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. Azariah Eshkenazi, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In his report, the expert diagnosed defendant with bipolar disorder and polysubstance abuse. Dr. Eshkenazi opined that, at the time of the lethal events in the victim's home, defendant's "ability to formulate an intent [to kill the victim] was certainly impaired to one degree or another." The expert attributed that impairment to defendant's "psychiatric condition and the drugs that he abused . . . ." The expert's findings are consistent with defendant's account that he had ingested angel dust and smoked marijuana in the victim's bathroom before the attack, had begun to hallucinate, and perceived that the victim was armed and about to shoot him.
The State disputed defendant's claims of diminished capacity. Its case was bolstered by the fact that defendant had made inculpatory statements when he was interviewed by police after his arrest. There was also clear and undisputed evidence that defendant was the person who had attacked the victim.
The prosecutor's office and defense counsel engaged in lengthy plea negotiations for about a year. During that time, the prosecutor's office had an estimated thirty discussions with members of the victim's family. Some of those family members wanted the maximum punishment imposed on defendant, while others were willing to accept a plea agreement that exposed defendant to a less severe sentence.
On January 22, 2013, defendant and his counsel appeared before a judge in the Criminal Part ("the first judge") and presented to him a negotiated plea. Under the terms of that plea, defendant agreed to forego a trial and plead guilty to a reduced charge of first-degree aggravated manslaughter, N.J.S.A. 2C:11-4(a). The State, in turn, agreed to recommend to the court a sentence of a twenty-seven-year custodial term, subject to an 85% parole ineligibility period under the No Early Release Act ("NERA"), N.J.S.A. 2C:43-7.2. The first judge accepted the factual basis placed on the record to support the aggravated manslaughter conviction, as well as the terms of the plea agreement. The matter was then set down for sentencing.
On March 8, 2013, the parties appeared before a different judge for sentencing ("the second judge"). Following an extended colloquy, the second judge vacated the plea. Defendant filed a motion for leave to appeal, which this court denied.
Defendant was tried before a third judge, and a jury, in a four-week trial ending in July 2014. He was found guilty of all eleven counts of the indictment.
On October 24, 2014, defendant was sentenced on count four, first-degree murder, N.J.S.A. 2C:11-3(a)(1) and (2), to a sixty-year term of incarceration, with eighty-five percent parole ineligibility under NERA. Counts six, eight, ten, and eleven merged into count four. The prison terms for the remaining counts were made concurrent to count four.
Defendant appealed to this court. Among other things, he argued the second judge abused her discretion by setting aside the negotiated plea. He also raised various contentions of trial error.
In our unpublished September 2016 opinion, we reached only the plea nullification issue, finding that the second judge had erred in several respects. Estrada I, slip op. at 11. Specifically, we held that the second judge erred when she: concluded that voluntary intoxication was not a defense to purposeful murder; found that the expert report from the examining psychologist, Dr. Eshkenazi, did not support defendant's diminished capacity defense; invoked her own life experiences to inform her legal judgment; and gave undue weight to the statements of the victim's family in deciding whether to accept or reject the plea. Id. at 11-14.
Because of these errors, we vacated the 2013 order setting aside the plea and remanded for "reexamination of the negotiated plea under the appropriate legal criteria expressed in Rule 3:9-3(e) and case law," and "[a] fresh assessment of whether the plea should or should not be set aside . . . ." Id. at 14. In so ruling, we declined to "determine in advance the scope of what the trial court [could] consider in the remand proceeding," including "what, if any, weight or consideration [should] be accorded to the [trial] proofs" or the guilty verdicts, leaving these questions "of scope and relevance" to be decided in the first instance by the trial court. Id. at 14-15.
Following a hearing, a fourth judge set aside the plea agreement a second time, after finding the agreement did not serve the interests of justice. The judge largely relied on the report and trial testimony of the State's psychiatric expert, Dr. Steven Simring, along with the presentence report and the trial testimony of both defendant and Dr. Eshkenazi. Following her ruling on the plea, the judge ruled that the sixty-year prison sentence imposed after the trial should "remain in full force and effect."
Defendant now appeals again. He renews these arguments from his original brief that were not addressed in our September 2016 opinion:
He also raised these points in a pro se supplemental brief:
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